China's aircraft carrier

IT WAS almost certainly just coincidence. But the ceremony attended by China’s leaders on September 25th in the northern port city of Dalian to mark the entry into service of the country’s first aircraft carrier will have struck many of its jittery neighbours as an ominous sign of intent. With tensions building up with Japan in the past few weeks over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands in the East China Sea, the addition of a carrier to China’s growing naval fleet will have done nothing to lower the temperature. After all, what are carriers for if not to project power?

Smart ammunition

MILITARY snipers are competitive types. There is an ongoing and grisly contest between them to see who can kill an enemy soldier from the farthest distance away. The present record is held by Craig Harrison, a corporal in the British Army's Household Cavalry, who managed to kill two Taliban soldiers from 2,475 metres in November 2009. That was a slight improvement on the previous record, held by Rob Furlong, a Canadian soldier also fighting in Afghanistan, who managed to shoot his enemy in the chest from a distance of 2,430 metres in 2002.

Such long-range killings are the exception rather than the norm, as long-distance shooting is extremely difficult.

Global Zero

HAVING based much of his recent re-election campaign on strident anti-Western rhetoric, President Vladimir Putin has decided to boycott this weekend's G8 meeting at Camp David and is only sending a mid-ranking diplomat to the follow-on NATO summit in Chicago. It is a pity on a number of counts, but perhaps most of all because Barack Obama was keen to build on last year's ratification of the New START treaty by beginning a conversation with his Russian opposite number about further deep cuts in both countries' still-bloated nuclear arsenals.

Britain and the Joint Strike Fighter

MAKING the best of a bad job, Philip Hammond, Britain's defence secretary, today reversed, as expected, the decision of his predecessor to buy the carrier (C) variant of Lockheed-Martin's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter instead of the short take-off and vertical landing (B) variant. The embarrassment was compounded by the fact that it was only 19 months ago that the prime minister, David Cameron, had announced that as a result of the coalition government's defence review, Britain would buy the F-35C rather than the F-35B ordered by the previous Labour government.

Reading the Abbottabad papers

THE documents seized from Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compound a year ago that were released on May 3rd are both fascinating and unsurprising. The picture they paint is consistent with briefings from intelligence sources that were recently reported in The Economist of a deeply frustrated man who had seen most of his close colleagues killed, was baffled by how to respond to the Arab spring, had little control over al-Qaeda (AQ) “franchises” in Yemen and the Maghreb and whose plotting against Western targets had become almost entirely detached from the reality of the hollowed-out terrorist network's ability to deliver.

Pakistan's security state

THE secret NATO report on the Taliban leaked to the BBC is full of fascinating stuff, but it mostly confirms what was already known rather than shedding new light on the conflict in Afghanistan. The report, called “The State of the Taliban” and based on interrogations with more than 4,000 Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees is, however, rich in anecdotal evidence about the way that Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, controls and sustains the Taliban and other extremist groups in Afghanistan.

The semi-comforting belief that only “rogue elements” in the ISI have close connections to the Taliban never had much basis in fact and it has less now.

America and Pakistan

WHEN the news came through on November 26th that up to 24 Pakistani soldiers had been killed in a cross-border incident involving American and Afghan forces, your correspondent was at ISAF HQ in Kabul preparing to interview General John Allen, the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan. The mood at ISAF was one of deep shock combined with a sense of foreboding. The timing was awful. General Allen had only just returned from a visit to General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of Pakistan's army general staff, in a bid to improve relations that were already under the severest strain.

America's defence budget

IN THIS week's print edition our Lexington columnist considers the prospect of big cuts in America's defence budget, which are due to be triggered as a result of the failure of the supercommittee. Will a legislative accident really cause America to lose its position as the world's leading military power?

IN THE summer of 2010 Admiral Mike Mullen, then still chairman of America's joint chiefs of staff, said that the biggest security threat facing the nation was the national debt. The proposition that military strength depends in the long run on economic health is hardly controversial.

Britain's Ministry of Defence

IN THE end, he had to go. Liam Fox is a bouncy, cocky, “nod's as good as a wink” charmer, much loved by the right of his party for his ideological certainty and equally distrusted by the more liberal Cameroons for his poorly disguised contempt for their centrist pragmatism. But not even the ebullient Dr Fox could face down the daily flow of revelation about his reckless relationship with Adam Werritty and the manifest conflicts of interest it caused him.

Cybersecurity

THE British foreign secretary's Twitter-borne Q&A on cyberspace was, predictably, less than enlightening. In one tweet William Hague declares:

“I agree w/ @graphiclunarkid internet should be open & safe for all, with right balance between intellectual property & accessibility”

But how, precisely, should one balance openness and security on the internet? How to preserve the inventiveness and productivity of the digital age, while averting the threats of crime, espionage and warfare in cyberspace?

The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki

THE successful drone strike that on September 30th killed Anwar al-Awlaki and at least four other senior operatives from al-Qaeda's Yemen-based franchise (known as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninisula, or AQAP) may turn out to be even more significant than the raid on Abbottabad that ended the life of Osama bin Laden. Although bin Laden's death was a cathartic moment for most Americans, and the special forces that swept through his squalid lair carried off an intelligence treasure trove, al-Qaeda's embattled leader had been a busted flush, from an operational point of view, for some time.

America and Pakistan

HAS Admiral Mike Mullen, who retires next month after two terms as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, become a tad “demob happy”—or is America engaged in a serious, some would say overdue, attempt to redefine its relationship with Pakistan? Nobody has put more effort than Admiral Mullen (pictured above left) into nurturing the fractious but vital military-to-military relationship between the two countries. When I saw him in Washington, DC late last year, America's most senior military officer told me that he had travelled to Pakistan more than 20 times since 2008 for meetings with General Assfaq Kayani (pictured above right), Pakistan's top soldier.

In this blog, our correspondents provide reporting and analysis on the subjects of defence, security and diplomacy, covering weapons and warfare, spooks and cyber-attacks, diplomats and dead-drops. The blog is named after Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian soldier and military theorist whose classic work, "On War", is still widely studied today.